A typical provision list for the Pilgrims might have resembled the one created by John Smith after returning to England from the Jamestown settlement. His list of tools included broad and narrow hoes; broad axes, pickaxes and felling axes; handsaws and whipsaws; hammers, shovels, and spades; tools for boring, drilling, and chiseling wood; hatchets and grindstones; and of course, every type of nail imaginable.
What resources did the Pilgrims have?
The plentiful water supply, good harbor, cleared fields, and location on a hill made the area a favorable place for settlement. Mayflower arrived in Plymouth Harbor on December 16, 1620 and the colonists began building their town.
What did the Pilgrims use as weapons?
The edged weapons brought to America by the Pilgrims were of four principal types, swords, daggers, pikes and halberds. The bayonet was almost unknown on this continent at the time. Of all these arms, swords were by far the most plentiful.
What materials did the Pilgrims use to build their houses?
They took clay, earth and grasses and mixed them together with water to make a mortar called daub. They pushed the daub into the wattle until it filled the wall and made a smooth surface on the inside. This smooth surface resembles the plaster on the walls in some modern homes.
What did the Pilgrims do for chores?
These skills included gardening, cooking and preserving food, tending to the younger children, and sewing and mending clothes and bedding. Pilgrim children spent much of their day working, but sometimes, their parents allowed them to play games that improved their bodies or minds.
Did the Pilgrims use bows?
The bow and arrow was the only long range weapon they had besides spears. The bow was mostly made out of wood, it was cheap to make. The bow and arrows were very good for hunting deer and other game. Swords were used mostly by Pilgrims.
Did the Pilgrims have knives?
You'll understand the connection.) FACT: The pilgrims didn't use forks; they ate with spoons, knives, and their fingers, opens a new window.
What did Pilgrims sleep in?
When it was time to sleep, passengers could choose between sleeping on the floor or in ad hoc bunks. These may have been wooden pallets attached to the ship's walls or cloth hammocks. A few may have even slept in the shallop — the small ship used to get from the Mayflower to shore upon landing.
What technology did the Pilgrims have?
The central technology that allowed the Pilgrims to survive was firepower. Although they befriended native tribes, their muskets and cannons guaranteed the colonists power in any struggle with Native Americans. Fermentation was equally important in an area where local water sources were not trusted.
What are Pilgrim houses called?
Pilgrim Homes Were Modeled After English Cottages The Pilgrims left England in pursuit of religious freedom, but they couldn't break free from their motherland's preferred style of home design: the traditional English cottage.
Did the Pilgrims have toilets?
One Smelly Ride We might find that shocking today, but in the 1600s, no one had bathrooms. People relieved themselves in outhouses or chamber pots, basically a fancy term for a bucket in a corner of the house that people squatted over to do their business.
What are 5 facts about the Pilgrims?
5 Facts You Probably Didn't Know About The PilgrimsThe Mayflower didn't land in Plymouth first. ... Plymouth, Massachusetts Wasn't Named For Plymouth, England. ... Some of the Mayflower's passengers had been to America before. ... The pilgrims dwindled – and then flourished. ... The first Thanksgiving meal wasn't “traditional.”
What foods did the Pilgrims not eat?
It is also worth noting what was not present at the first Thanksgiving feast. There were no cloudlike heaps of mashed potatoes, since white potatoes had not yet crossed over from South America. There was no gravy either, since the colonists didn't yet have mills to produce flour.
What weapons did the colonies use?
The American Revolutionary Soldiers used a variety of different weapons including muskets, pistols, rifles, long rifles, knives, bayonets, tomahawks, axes, swords, sabres, pole arms and cannon. The soldiers also carried the equipment needed to fight, such as shot molds, tinder lighters and cartridge boxes.
What did the colonists use as weapons?
Muskets. Weapons were the army's main concern. The most important weapon during the American Revolution was the musket—a long smoothbore gun (a gun without grooves inside its barrel) fired from the shoulder—with a bayonet attached at the end. These weapons led to a certain style of fighting in the 1700s.
Did the Pilgrims have cannons?
The Pilgrims had brought with them several different types of cannons, which they hauled up to the second story of the fort and mounted in a way that could command the whole harbor. The largest was a minion cannon, which was brass, weighed about 1200 pounds, and could shoot a 3.5 pound cannonball nearly a mile.
What stone was used for weapons?
Over human history flint has been used to make knives, spearheads, arrow heads, axe heads, and more – war clubs and the like. The carving of flint was so commonplace that pieces of worked flint are still found today in some parts of Europe and Africa.
What type of shotgun did the Pilgrims use?
The Pilgrims were equipped with Blunderbusses, an early form of a shotgun, but at the time they were really expensive so it would have been difficult to buy a large number of them. With their short barrel and devastating loads they were great for hunting, but these muzzleloaders were often adapted for combat. They also used the innovative flintlock action.
What were the weapons of the settlers?
Most of the settlers’ personal weapons would have been matchlock muskets. Pistols were expensive and this was truly the working man’s arm back in 1620. The crude matchlock, meaning a match is used to light gunpowder, first appeared around 1450 in Europe.
How to use a hammer to fire powder?
To use one, a person must pour powder into the pan, use a stick to push a ball down the barrel, and ensure the match ( the burning piece of rope) was still lit before firing. The rope attaches to the hammer and then hammer drops into the pan, igniting the powder.
How many people were on the Mayflower?
In November 1620, after spending just over 65-days on the open ocean, the Mayflower dropped anchor off the shores of what we today call Massachusetts. Onboard, 130 passengers stood, anxious, to embark on adventures in a new and hostile world.
When was the Snaphaunce invented?
Introduced in 1570 , the Snaphaunce was an early form of the Flintlock. It used two main mechanisms and a rather complex system to set off the action. When the trigger is pressed it releases the hammer, which has the flint attached to the head, and then the flint will strike a rough side of the flash pan.
Who was the first settlers to set foot on American soil?
And they did all these various things with guns in their hands, the very first likely held by John Alden, the ship’s cooper, as he became the first the expedition to set foot on what would be American soil.
Why is the Miquelet lock called the Miquelet lock?
Despite its Spanish name, the Miquelet-lock was actually used by lots of folks all over Europe, Northern Africa and the Middle East, only it garners its name because the Spanish military or Miquelet trained and fought with the device regularly.
What tools did the Pilgrims use?
His list of tools included broad and narrow hoes; broad axes, pickaxes and felling axes; handsaws and whipsaws; hammers, shovels, and spades; tools for boring, drilling, and chiseling wood; hatchets and grindstones; and of course, every type of nail imaginable. Additionally, iron implements for cooking and homemaking were important additions to these lists. Women were as much involved in the survival of the settlements as men, tasked with handling unfamiliar ingredients and meager resources.
What were the tools used in the Plymouth Colony?
Crucial to the development of Plymouth Colony were axes. The 17th-century axe used by the English consisted of two pieces of iron hammered and welded down the center of a poll. As the colonists built their homes out of the timber native to the region, they found their traditional tools insufficient for the task of felling trees. During the process of repair work, blacksmiths up and down the coast began experimenting with lengthening the side of the axe that wrapped around the poll, creating more room for the welding surface. This resulted in a tool with more weight and better balance, and modern axes descend from this model. Generally, however, the tools produced by Plymouth blacksmiths were rough and unrefined copies of the superior English implements originally brought over. Improvements or changes in style were rare.
What did the Plymouth colonists use to hunt?
For thousands of years, the Wampanoag developed their own system of hunting and gathering using tools adapted from nature, including bone, stone, wood and shell. The Pilgrims were not the first Europeans the Wampanoag had encountered, but their community presented opportunities for both economic and cultural trade.
What tools did the Wampanoag use?
Western tools certainly proved useful to the Wampanoag people, and they returned the favor by teaching the Pilgrims the fundamentals of survival in their new home, such as growing Indian corn and hunting animals. Firearms such as fowlers aided in this process. Bullet molds and “fun worms” to clean out the barrel of guns are among the commonly found remnants at archaeological sites. Lead bullets were used to fowl birds, and at least in the early days of Plymouth Colony firearms were viewed more as a means for securing food than weaponry.
What did the Wampanoag do to improve their own tools?
While the Pilgrims frequently acted suspicious and hostile towards their native neighbors, the Wampanoag took advantage of English materials to improve their own tools. Cast-off nails replaced bone as drills in pre-modern mechanisms; English pots acquired through trade were hammered and rounded over stones to create eating utensils; and iron fishing hooks quickly took the place of bone hooks. Beads, buttons, and other decorative accessories appealed to the Wampanoag as a means of currency, and might have been adapted into ornamental pieces for spiritual or ritual use. For example, copper scraps were turned into pendants and often were buried with esteemed members of the tribe.
What did the Pilgrims do when they left Europe?
When the Pilgrims left Europe, they left behind a deforested landscape completely cultivated for agriculture. In America, they encountered differences in climate, environment, and vegetation. The abundance of wood in Southeastern Massachusetts made it easy to immediately begin construction on houses and fortification for settlements. Two-man pit saws (also known as whipsaws) aided this process for the first few decades, and colonists quickly established sawmills to process and export clapboards made from Eastern White Pine, Oak, and Cedar trees.
What tools were found on the provision list?
Tools often found on provision lists were locks and keys. The Pilgrims, bound together as a community and dependent on each other for survival, still valued privacy and social boundaries. Locks also imply protection, for even their few valuable items might be subject to theft or opportunity – particularly as their colony became increasingly vulnerable to the presence of external forces.
The Mayflower Voyage
The Mayflower Compact
- Rough seas and storms prevented the Mayflower from reaching their initial destination in Virginia, and after a voyage of 65 days the ship reached the shores of Cape Cod, anchoring on the site of Provincetown Harbor in mid-November. Discord ensued before the would-be colonists even left the ship. The passengers who were not separatists–-referred to as “strangers” by their more doc…
Settling at Plymouth
- After sending an exploring party ashore, the Mayflower landed at what they would call Plymouth Harbor, on the western side of Cape Cod Bay, in mid-December. During the next several months, the settlers lived mostly on the Mayflower and ferried back and forth from shore to build their new storage and living quarters. The settlement’s first fort and watchtower was built on what is now …
The First Thanksgiving
- The native inhabitants of the region around Plymouth Colony were the various tribes of the Wampanoag people, who had lived there for some 10,000 years before the Europeans arrived. Soon after the Pilgrims built their settlement, they came into contact with Tisquantum, or Squanto, an English-speaking Native American. Squanto was a member of the Pawtuxet tribe (from prese…
Relations with Native Americans
- After attempts to increase his own power by turning the Pilgrims against Massasoit, Squanto died in 1622, while serving as Bradford’s guide on an expedition around Cape Cod. Other tribes, such as the Massachusetts and Narragansetts, were not so well disposed towards European settlers, and Massasoit’s alliance with the Pilgrims disrupted relations among Native American peoples in th…
The Pilgrim Legacy in New England
- Repressive policies toward religious nonconformists in England under King James I and his successor, Charles I, had driven many men and women to follow the Pilgrims’ path to the New World. Three more ships traveled to Plymouth after the Mayflower, including the Fortune (1621), the Anne and the Little James (both 1623). In 1630, a group of some 1,000 Puritan refugees und…